The news from mychoice.ca is that Nancy Daigneault is no longer president of it. She has “moved on”, but there’s no indication of where she went.

One one hand, the job market for professional liars like Daigneault has been pretty good for the past few years. On the other hand, if a prospective employer were to ask her for a list of what she actually accomplished during her tenure as president of mychoice.ca, it would be a very short list.

The new president is Arminda Mota. Huh? How did that happen? The “members” of mychoice.ca (they have now raised this to 45,000) certainly didn’t get a chance to vote on it. So, who made this decision? British American Tobacco? The Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council? It’s a good question to ask if Ms. Mota should ever appear on a radio phone-in show.

One of her first actions as president was to discontinue the forum on the mychoice.ca site. The excuse given for this was that mychoice.ca had its budget cut, and they couldn’t afford it any more.

Here’s the real story. You can buy a hosting account from Dreamhost for $100/year that provides pretty much unlimited bandwidth and disk space. Dreamhost also supplies a one-click install for phpbb. There is, of course, an administrative cost; somebody has to check the site each day and remove spam postings, as well as postings that might attract the attention of lawyers looking for a defamation case. Or law enforcement officers looking for threats of violence.

Mychoice.ca had a guy on the payroll to perform this function. It’s hard to believe that they couldn’t afford to pay him. Even it you’re dumb enough to believe this, if mychoice.ca really had 45,000 members, instead of 45, they should have had very little difficulty locating an volunteer to take on this responsibility.

It’s just another example of the contempt that the tobacco industry has for their loyal customers.